Issue No. 5

 Sept/Oct, 2009

In each issue of Spitfire Sparks, we offer our readers interesting insights and new tips to help strengthen their communications efforts. We are excited to announce that we have added a host of new expertise to the talented Spitfire team. This not only means more insights and tips for you, but also expanded services in several key communications areas for all our clients.

Janice Laurente and Jaymie Gustafson each recently joined Spitfire as senior associates. Both Janice (hailing from the global consulting firm FD) and Jaymie (most recently at Weber Shandwick) have extensive expertise in online strategy and social networking. A former Hill staffer Janice also adds more policy experience to the Spitfire team, while Jaymie adds new marketing skills to the mix.

Lisa Falconer (formerly of BearingPoint) has joined Spitfire as a senior account executive, bringing more than a decade of experience developing communications strategies for both nonprofit and public sector clients. As Spitfire’s newest account executive, Torie Brazitis adds another creative mind to Spitfire’s political communications bench strength, having served most recently as a communications director and press secretary on Capitol Hill.

Joining Spitfire as account coordinators, Sarah McLean and Jessica Rockland have moved to Spitfire from Widmeyer Communications and Ketchum respectively.

And last but not least, Spitfire is pleased to welcome Piper Kerman back on staff as a vice president and anchor of our New York operations. Piper brings additional online capacity to the team and is also a mainstay of Spitfire’s strategic communications training programs.

We look forward to introducing you to our new staff in the months ahead. To learn more about our entire team, long onto our staff bios page.

What's Inside

Good to Great - Stop Message Creep

Say What? Speak Your Audience's Language

On a Shoestring - Storybanks Personalize Your Cause

Don't Drink the Kool-Aid - Messaging Gone Wrong

Good to Great - Smart Strategies for Success

Stop Message Creep

by Torie Brazitis, Account Executive

The military term "mission creep" describes the slow expansion of a mission over time in the attempt to get as much done as possible all at once. This is a dangerous phenomenon and can end in disaster.

The communications equivalent is "message creep." Message creep pulls a communications strategy off-balance. Inconsistent use of targeted key messages will distract from your objectives and hamper progress toward reaching your goals. Here is an in-depth case study of how badly message creep can hurt.

Spur-of-the-moment decisions can cause you to stray from strategic goals and messages, leading you to leap too far from your issue and improvise responses to opportunities instead of using careful, targeted messaging toward decision makers.

How do you avoid message creep? Before every meeting or pitch call, remind yourself how these actions directly help to accomplish your larger communications goals. Each specific success will build on the next and over time will create real change, so you should never attempt to do more than you can at one time.

After reviewing your broader goals, review your message set for your target audience. Try condensing these messages into four short bullets and place them where you can refer to them whenever you need to speak to or write for this audience.

Worried that message creep has already happened? Here’s a good way to check. Review the messages that you used in a few (three or four) of your recent outreach efforts against your bullet points. If they don’t match up, now is the time to refocus to stay on track with your goals.

A focused, strategic communications strategy will effectively get your message out and help you tell your organization’s story. Don’t let message creep throw you off-balance!

Say What?

Speak Your Audience's Language

by Lisa Falconer, Senior Associate

Complicated technical terms and a myriad of shorthand abbreviations are quite common in complex policy areas. The terms are familiar to you, but to everyone else it sounds like a foreign language. We call it MEGO: my eyes glaze over. It happens during a presentation when the audience goes from nodding in agreement to staring off into space.

Luckily there is an easy cure for MEGO. Simplifying and focusing your language is a highly effective communications strategy to successfully engage audiences that are unfamiliar with your issue area. Here are a few tips for avoiding the most common pitfalls of MEGO.

Call It What It Is. When explaining a concept to your audience, try to describe it in the simplest way possible to make it easy to grasp.

• Charismatic megafauna vs. large cute animals
• Transit-dependent vs. people who ride the bus
• Way-finding systems vs. signs
  

Avoid Acronyms. Acronyms are everywhere in the policy world, but that doesn’t mean they have to be used in your messaging. EPSDT stands for Early Periodic Screening Diagnosis and Treatment Program. Six recognizable words, but what do they mean? It’s the part of Medicaid that helps low-income kids have access to health checkups and follow-up treatments. While it takes a little longer to explain it, messaging around helping kids stay healthy is a lot more compelling that a five-letter acronym.

Use Descriptive Titles. Much like avoiding acronyms, people are more likely to support a new policy if they understand what it is about. People can get behind The Healthy Families Act; it’s harder to get excited about H.R. 2460.

While it may feel strange at first to speak in a new way about something so familiar to you, reigning in the jargon can go a long way in helping you deliver meaningful messages that resonate with your stakeholders.

On a Shoestring - Low Cost Strategies for High Impact

Storybanks Personalize Your Cause

by Maura Zehr, Junior Account Executive

One of the most powerful assets nonprofits have for advancing social justice is the face behind the cause. Statistics and charts have their place, but personal stories humanize an issue and make it easier to understand. All organizations can benefit from creating their own storybanks. These collections of compelling stories can be used to make the case to policymakers, attract potential donors or reach out to reporters. Having the stories already written and vetted will make it that much easier for you to move quickly when you need one.

Organizations can create and present storybanks on any budget. They can be professionally designed storybooks, such as this one from the Center for Children’s Advocacy that highlights stories of children that the organization has helped through legal advocacy. A low cost alternative is to post your storybank on a special page or section of an organization’s Web site, which is how the League of Women Voters showcases members’ personal stories of achievement and leadership.

Here are a few tips for storybanking:

Decide what kinds of stories you’d like to collect: What kinds of stories would be most useful to your organization? Ideally, your storybank will include a variety of stories involving diverse people, different types of problems and varying outcomes.

Choose a storybanking system: Whether you collect your stories on paper and store them in a file folder, or collect them electronically and store them on your hard drive or in an online database, make sure your system is easy to use and that you have the resources necessary to maintain it.

Create a story collection form: Develop a form to ensure that you obtain the same kind of information for each story. It could be an online form accessible via a Web link, or a Microsoft Word document that can be e-mailed or faxed.

Not sure how to begin? Our colleague Andy Goodman has great resources that can guide you in creating your storybank. Follow these smart tips and your organization will be on its way to a rich collection of stories that will help you reach your goals.

Don't Drink the Kool-Aid - Avoid Everyday Pitfalls

Messaging Gone Wrong

by Kristen Grimm, President

Slate columnist Timothy Noah’s recent article about the healthcare reform debate is a must read for anyone charged with developing and disseminating messages to support their cause or interest.

This article is a sobering reminder that strong messaging is more than putting clever words together. When crafting messages, keeping a clear focus on the points those messages need to reinforce is critical. It seems a wide swath of Americans don’t realize that Medicare is a government program and many of them actually think that the government should keep its mitts off the program - i.e. government shouldn’t be involved in a program that is government run.

Before anyone can demonstrate that the government can run programs that are popular and important, there needs to be strong and consistent messaging that the government is running those programs. Someone is going to need to do some serious make-up work on Medicare – and fast. You can save yourself from a similar fate by heeding this lesson and remembering it the next time you have to develop new messaging. (Special thanks to First Focus President Bruce Lesley for sharing this article.)